Tactics: Goalpoachers?

The Question: what has happened to the classic goalpoacher?

Michael Owen is one of the last of a dying breed as more has become required of strikers as football has developed tactically

Michael Owen lacks the all-round game possessed by most of the world's top strikers. Photograph: John Walton/EMPICS Sport/PA

Michael Owen may be the arch-poacher, but even he seems to have accepted that the art in which he excelled is of declining relevance. In his 2004 autobiography, Off the Record, Owen was still fighting against the tide, condemning Kevin Keegan for his attempts while England manager to add variety to his game.

Yet by the end of last season, under Keegan at Newcastle, he was willingly operating in a deep role behind Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins. Owen is perhaps the last English example of his kind – at least at the highest level. There are two things at which he excels (or at least excelled): sitting on the shoulder of defenders and timing runs on to through balls, and getting across his marker at the near post to meet crosses. His diminishing pace has affected his ability to do the former, but he remains excellent at the latter (it is three years ago now, but his two late goals in the 3-2 win over Argentina in Geneva were typical).

No more Müllers

Over the last 40 years, numerous players have succeeded with similarly limited skill-sets. It would be hard to argue that the likes of Gerd Müller, Gary Lineker, Hossam Hassan or Filippo Inzaghi contributed much to the team beyond putting the ball in the back of the net, and yet all had distinguished international careers.

But football has changed. As a snap-shot of top-level modern football, let's take last season's Champions League quarter-finals. The main striker for each of the eight teams in the first legs were: Mirko Vucinic, Wayne Rooney, Kevin Kuranyi, Samuel Eto'o, Emmanuel Adebayor, Fernando Torres, Mateja Kezman and Didier Drogba. Of those, only Kezman even comes close to being an old-style poacher, and even he was operating as a lone forward, there as much to create space with his movement as to score (and, it may be noted, he was playing for Fenerbahce, probably the weakest of the quarter-finalists).

Improved defences

So why should goalscorers have gone out of fashion? There is a practical explanation. Put simply, defences are better now than they were before: it takes more to break them down. "A lot of the goals a poacher scored came from mistakes," said the Montenegro manager Zoran Filipovic, an outstanding centre-forward for Red Star Belgrade in the early seventies. "Maybe not an obvious mistake, but a loss of concentration, giving the forward a metre of space. With defences now that doesn't happen. And fitness is better. Players used to make mistakes because they were tired. Now they can concentrate better."

In addition, the liberalisation of the offside law over the past decade means that teams tend not to operate such a high defensive line. They don't leave so much space behind them, and so the ability to burst onto through-balls at pace and beat the goalkeeper in a one-on-one is less valuable than it once was.

That, in part, explains Chelsea's troubles at home this season: Nicolas Anelka is one of the best in the world when put through against the goalkeeper, but is only given the opportunity to demonstrate that when the opposition attempts to take the initiative and is unable to defend as deep as they may like. Of his 14 Premier League goals this season, only two have been the first of a game (and one of those deflected in fortuitously off his knee at Blackburn); of Chelsea's 12 Premier League victories, only two have been by a single goal: in other words, when Chelsea score early and the opposition chases the game, Anelka takes advantage.

Set positions or fluidity

But there are also more theoretical reasons for the poacher's decline. There are two basic ways of conceptualising a team: it is either a series of predetermined slots (the target-man, the holding midfielder, the right-back ...) into which players are dropped, or it is a holistic entity, in which the relationships between component parts are as significant as the parts themselves.

In reality, of course, most managers end up somewhere between the two extremes, their more idealistic impulses often tempered by the resources available. Football in Britain, though, far more than anywhere else in the world has tended towards the former. Players preferred the security of a "position" in whatever the default formation of the day was: 2-3-5 until the thirties, the W-M from then until the sixties, and 4-4-2 ever since.

Pundits are still bewilderingly suspicious of sides who refuse to play "two up", while there seems to be a general consensus that 4-4-2 is the only logical way for England to play. There is a certain logic to that, for while at club level there is time to work on other systems, at international level it is probably safest to stick to the tried and tested, the formation that is hard-wired into English players from birth.

That said, at Euro 96, Terry Venables's side played a highly fluid system that, although taking 4-4-2 as its base, could become 3-5-2, with Gareth Southgate stepping into midfield, or 4-3-3, with Steve McManaman advanced. In the 1990 World Cup, under Bobby Robson, England switched mid-tournament to a 3-5-2. (Such flexibility, of course, is indicative of the basic truth – which is surely what Fabio Capello was alluding to when he dismissed the Whole notion of formations – that designations such as 4-4-2 and 4-2-3-1 are nothing more than crude signifiers useful for providing observers with a general idea of patterns; there are always far more subtleties beneath, and it is with those that a coach deals on a day-to-day basis).

And in 1966, Alf Ramsey devised what would become known as the 4-4-2, despite the prevalence of W-M and 4-2-4 at club level. In other words, in the three tournaments in which England reached the semi-finals or better, they were using a formation that struck against the default. Which is perhaps to say no more than how we used to do things is not necessarily a blueprint for how we should do them now.

Lobanovskyi's science

Valeriy Lobanovskyi was not the first to take a holistic approach, but he was the first to use computers to aid his conceptualisation, and the first to explain his thinking in clear scientific terms. Influenced by the cybernetic techniques being pioneered at the Polytechnic Institute while he was a student in Kyiv, he saw football as a system of twenty-two elements – two sub-systems of eleven elements – moving within a defined area (the pitch) and subject to a series of restrictions (the laws of the game). If the two sub-systems were equal, the outcome would be a draw. If one were stronger, it would win.

What really fascinated Lobanovskyi is the peculiarity that in football the efficiency of the sub-system is greater than the sum of the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it. Football, he concluded, was less about individuals than about coalitions and the connections between them.

Universality or poachers and their partners

Lobanovskyi became convinced of the importance of "universality": if players could adapt, could play in two or three positions, could interchange on the field, those coalitions were less predictable and therefore harder to disrupt. In such a philosophy, there is no place for a player who is only a sniffer, whose only contribution is – to use Arrigo Sacchi's term – "reactionary", finishing chances created for him by his team-mates or presented him by the errors of the opposition.

Lobanovskyi hailed Andriy Shevchenko as the player who had come closest to his ideal of universality. Perhaps significantly, in his early days at Dynamo Kyiv, he was regularly outscored by Serhiy Rebrov – only later did his focus shift more to goalscoring; and even at Milan he regularly acted as a creator for Inzaghi. As such, he is the prototype for the modern forward.

Poachers operate best in partnerships. They need either a target-man to knock balls down to them (Niall Quinn and Kevin Phillips, Mark Hateley and Ally McCoist) or a deep-lying creator to feed balls through for them (Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush, Dennis Bergkamp and Nicolas Anelka). That, though, draws a player from midfield, which decreases flexibility and thus a side's capacity to control space.

Mourinho's modern forwards

The best modern forwards are universal players; effectively hybrids of the old partnerships. The likes of Didier Drogba and Emmanuel Adebayor are both target-man and quick-man, battering-rams and goalscorers, imposing physically and yet also capable of finesse. A Thierry Henry or a David Villa mixes the best qualities of the creator and goalscorer, capable of dropping deep or pulling wide, as adept at playing the final ball as taking chances himself. Somewhere in between the two extremes are ranged Samuel Eto'o, Fernando Torres, Dimitar Berbatov and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

English football, though, seems reluctant to adapt, as Jose Mourinho pointed out. "I can't believe that in England they don't teach young players to be multi-functional," he said. "To them it's just about knowing one position and playing that position. To them a striker is a striker and that's it. For me, a striker is not just a striker. He's somebody who has to move, who has to cross, and who has to do this in a 4-4-2 or in a 4-3-3 or in a 3-5-2."

Glut of creators

By playing one of the hybrid strikers as a lone forward, a coach can accommodate three – perhaps four – creators, allowing greater fluidity and flexiblity, which in turn enables the control of space Lobanovskyi demanded. Football's development off-field, possibly not by design, has gone hand-in-hand with that thinking, as academies have produced a glut of attacking midfielders.

It may even be that in the absence of the hybrid striker it is better to play with none at all (the 4-6-0 foretold by Carlos Alberto Parreira, and practised by Roma and Manchester United last season and, more recently, Everton), or with an otherwise undistinguished target-man who can hold the ball up – hence the return to favour of Emile Heskey (it is worth noting in this context that Aime Jacquet has always insisted Stephane Guivarc'h's contribution to France's World Cup triumph in 1998 was undervalued and, as Rob Smyth argued on these pages, thatSerginho's contribution to Brazil in the 1982 World Cup may have been misunderstood.

Is this it for Owen?

So is there any place for poachers in modern football? The bad news for Owen is that if there is, it is probably at somewhere like Newcastle. After watching Lobanovskyi's USSR beat Italy 2-0 in the semi-final of Euro 88 with a breath-taking demonstration of their pressing principles, Marcello Lippi hailed the victory of systematised pressing – of the necessity of controlling space (as Lobanovskyi, Rinus Michels and Sacchi had been arguing).

That means universality, and that means no poachers. But that sort of football is hugely difficult to play, and there is an argument that sides who are not capable of it may as well ensure they make the most of whatever chances come their way. Equally, it may be that good sides having an off day and in desperate search of a goal should abandon a stuttering quest for control and trust to chance by knocking balls forward, looking for dead-balls and lucky breaks, trying to stimulate panic in opponents who are holding the lead. Again, in those circumstances, it may be useful to bring a poacher off the bench so that if a chance does materialise, it is as likely as possible to be taken.

Far better, though, for good sides is to reduce as far as possible the workings of chance, and to trust reason and ability and do everything possible to control the flow of chances by controlling space. You don't win games by scoring goals; you score goals by winning games.